The celebrated US scientist and inventor on not being in it for the money, why diversity improves problem-solving, and his dedication to exercisingThe chemical engineer Robert Langer co-founded Covid-19 vaccine maker Moderna, and his innovations have helped create more than 100 products from artificial skin to messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines. The 73-year-old has a mountain of research papers and patents to his name, on top of which he has started more than 40 companies and won more than 200 awards, including the Queen Elizabeth prize, which has been called the “Nobel for engineering”. Langer’s biomedical engineering lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he holds a professorship, employs more than 100 researchers. He spoke to the Observer to mark Unesco World Engineering Day for Sustainable Development, held earlier this month.Last year you debuted on Forbes magazine’s billionaires list. Being a co-founder of Moderna has been profitable! How did it feel?

My nine-year-old’s curiosity about the place I grew up and where generations of my family were raised has made me look at it with new eyes“Why don’t we live here? Why did you ever leave?” This is Solomon, nine, one of my sons; and these are familiar questions he enjoys directing my way. We’ve just left Goodison Park, the ground of Everton, our football team; and we’re walking back to my parents’ home, not far away. Everton won the game (never a given, recently), and Solly is on a high; he wants to linger in the streets around Goodison, as he does whenever we visit. He likes all the ways the area is different from our home. That it’s rougher, not as pretty – poorer, to put it plainly – than our bourgeois patch of Kensal Green, in London, is all upside to him. He likes the shop we’ve just popped into for sweets with its Haribos behind caged wire like so much precious cargo. He likes the cheeky lads on their bikes, larking around as if auditioning for a documentary dedicated to “life on the street”.If it were a pal alongside me, I’d be teasing him for romanticising my old home, for taking a walk on the wild side. But it’s my boy and I can’t help but smile at how much he’s enjoying himself. Continue reading...

As numbers admitted to hospital rise again, ministers face calls to extend fourth vaccination beyond the over-75s

Scientists at home and abroad criticise decision to cancel widely admired infection-surveillance projects including React-1 and Zoe

Analysis of 10 pieces by neurologist Dr Paul McCrory, who quit the Concussion in Sport Group, suggests he may have copied other work without proper attribution

Exclusive: Technology developed for new type of contraceptive pill could be applied to other medicinesNew technology that allows for daily medications to instead be taken just once a week or month could transform the lives of people with conditions ranging from schizophrenia to opioid addiction, researchers have said.The method has also been developed for a new type of contraceptive pill – a capsule, initially tested in pigs, that dissolves in the stomach to release a six-armed structure that delivers synthetic hormones over three weeks before falling apart and exiting the body. Continue reading...

Brandt’s vole found to engineer ecosystem to scan skies for shrikes and deny them perchesA rodent that lives on the plains of Inner Mongolia fells tall grasses so that it can scan the skies for flying predators, a study involving experts from the University of Exeter has found.The practice by Brandt’s voles also means that shrikes, a type of carnivorous bird, are denied handy perches and places to use as larders for their prey, the study discovered. Continue reading...

Another new coronavirus variant has been identified, this one containing elements of Delta and Omicron

Increase in infections to estimated one in 25 people follows similar trend in ScotlandOne in 25 people in England had Covid last week, figures show, causing a rise in the rates of hospital admissions.The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, based on swabs from randomly selected households, reveal an estimated 2,073,900 people in the community in England had Covid in the week ending 5 March, equating to 3.8% of the population or about one in 25 people. The week before, the figure was about one in 30. Continue reading...

From the kneejerk to the insincere, there are many kinds of apologies. But which ones count? Here’s how to get it right – and why it mattersIt had been 20 years since I’d seen my aunt. In that time I’d lived a full life, written a book and had a baby, but as she stared at my bottom, I knew what she was thinking. Then she said it: “Are you competing with Mary?” There was some skill here: in a few words, she’d deftly managed to insult both my cousin and me. The subtext was: you’ve got as fat as her.Fuelled by post-partum hormones, I decided to tell my aunt, for the first time, how insulting I found this. “I’m sorry,” she said, “if you chose to take offence at what I said.” Ah. The apology rendered immediately void by the word if. Continue reading...

With the film My Octopus Teacher showing their complexity, questions are being raised about plans for the world’s first farmOne of the hardest things about working with octopuses is their mood swings, says Dr Alex Schnell. They can be bold and gregarious one day, “and then the next day they refuse to come out of their den”, says the behavioural ecologist, who studies cephalopods.Octopuses are complex, intelligent creatures: they can change the colour and texture of their skin, disguise themselves, use tools and squeeze into tiny spaces. Their intricate lives burst into the public consciousness in 2020 with the Oscar-winning documentary My Octopus Teacher, about the relationship between a film-maker and an octopus. Continue reading...

Pair join Gordon Brown and 127 others in attack on ‘self-defeating nationalism, pharmaceutical monopolies and inequality’Prince Harry and Meghan, the actor Charlize Theron and the former British prime minister Gordon Brown are among 130 signatories to a letter lambasting wealthy countries’ approach to the Covid-19 pandemic, labelling it “immoral, entirely self-defeating and also an ethical, economic and epidemiological failure”.In a strongly worded open letter published on Friday, the signatories warned “the pandemic is not over”, and said the failure to vaccinate the world was down to “self-defeating nationalism, pharmaceutical monopolies and inequality”. Continue reading...

Australian researchers raise concerns mutated virus could spread in the community if patients given the drug are not monitored

Bleak picture for biodiversity as analysis of over 80,000 species forecasts more losers than winnersResearchers have categorised more than 80,000 plant species worldwide and found that most of them will “lose” in the face of humanity – going extinct because people don’t need them.This means that plant communities of the future will be hugely more homogenised than those of today, according to the paper published in the journal Plants, People, Planet. Continue reading...

Changes to birds’ size, habits and morphology have been linked to rising temperaturesGlobal warming is changing European birds as we know them, a study has found, but it’s not just the increase in temperature that’s to blame.Researchers have found that garden warblers, for example, are having a quarter fewer chicks, which has huge implications for the species. Chiffchaffs are laying their eggs 12 days earlier. Some birds are decreasing in size, while others, such as redstarts, are getting larger. Continue reading...

Imperial College study finds R value higher for older people, raising concerns about waning immunityCovid cases appear to be rising in older people as increased socialising, waning immunity and a more transmissible version of the Omicron variant threaten to fuel a resurgence of the virus.Tests on nearly 100,000 swabs from homes across England reveal that, while infections have fallen overall since the January peak, one in 35 people tested positive between 8 February and 1 March, with cases either level or rising in those aged 55 and over. Continue reading...

Although several countries around the world continue to have high rates of Covid-19 infections, including the UK and US, many of their citizens are yet to be infected with the Sars-Cov-2 virus. This includes countless individuals who have knowingly been exposed, often multiple times, but have still never had a positive test.Madeleine Finlay speaks to Linda Geddes about how scientists are trying to solve the mystery of why some people seemingly don’t catch Covid, and what could be behind this phenomenonArchive: KRON4 Continue reading...

Vessel located more than a century after it sank on voyage of exploration in the Antarctic

Scientists name ‘incredibly rare’ fossil in recognition of Biden’s ‘plans to address climate change and to fund scientific research’A newly discovered fossilized vampire squid has been named after the US president, Joe Biden, a team of paleontologists has announced.The Syllipsimopodi bideni, which has been described as an “incredibly rare” fossil, was first dug up in Montana and then donated to the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada in 1988. Continue reading...

Be guided by your child’s age and personality, and take practical steps to show them they’re safe in the present moment

From imperial decrees to Sappho’s poems, Ithaca system can find word patterns and suggest age of textArtificial intelligence could bring to life lost texts, from imperial decrees to the poems of Sappho, researchers have revealed, after developing a system that can fill in the gaps in ancient Greek inscriptions and pinpoint when and where they are from.Dr Thea Sommerschield, a co-author of the research at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and Harvard University, said inscriptions were important as they were written directly by ancient people and were evidence of the thought, language, society and history of past civilisations. Continue reading...

Call comes as G7 agriculture ministers prepare to discuss food price volatility as war rages in Ukraine

We don’t fully understand the virus’s impact on the brain. It is vital that we maintain a high regard for the unpredictability of even mild infectionsOne of the most important studies in the pandemic – studying the potential impact of Covid on the brain – was just published. The major findings of loss of gray matter, reduced brain size, and cognitive decline are concerning and need to be placed in context.If you want to determine whether the SARS-CoV-2 virus can damage the brain, you would ideally have a MRI brain scan before and after the Covid infection and a matched (for age and sex, medical history) control group of people without infection who also had two sets of brain images. It just so happened that in the United Kingdom over tens of thousands of people enrolled in their UK Biobank had undergone a brain scan before the pandemic and a subset of these were brought back at an average three years later, with or without having had Covid. They also had basic cognitive testing – a connect-the-dots type of test – with their brain scans.Eric Topol is the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, professor of molecular medicine, and executive vice-president of Scripps Research Continue reading...

Oldest known ancestor of octopuses unearthed in Montana in form of approximately 330m-year-old fossilScientists have found the oldest known ancestor of octopuses – an approximately 330m-year-old fossil unearthed in Montana.The researchers concluded the ancient creature lived millions of years earlier than previously believed, meaning that octopuses originated before the era of dinosaurs. Continue reading...

Finds from fourth-century wreck ‘perfectly preserved’ just 2m below the surface off one of Mallorca’s busiest beachesOne squally day or stormy night about 1,700 years ago, a boat carrying hundreds of amphorae of wine, olives, oil and garum – the fermented fish sauce that so delighted the ancient palate – came to grief during a stopover in Mallorca.The merchant vessel, probably at anchor in the Bay of Palma while en route from south-west Spain to Italy, was quickly swallowed by the waves and buried in the sands of the shallow seabed. Continue reading...

Since Vladimir Putin’s bizarre televised address announcing a ‘military operation’, the Russia-Ukraine war has been rife with disinformation and propaganda. Last week, Facebook and Instagram blocked access to the Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik across the European Union. In retaliation, Russia completely blocked access to Facebook and restricted access to Twitter. At the same time, misattributed videos purportedly showing nuclear weapons and Ukrainian fighter jets have been going viral.Ian Sample speaks to the Guardian’s global technology editor, Dan Milmo, about the ‘war myths’ propagated online, how the information war is being fought, and whose propaganda is having the biggest impactArchive: Sky News Continue reading...

People suffering debilitating cluster headaches say the active ingredient in magic mushrooms is a helpConservative drug reformers and leading psychiatrists are urging ministers to reclassify the psychedelic compound psilocybin so that researchers can explore its potential as a medicine.The same demand is being made by people suffering from cluster headaches – which involve severe pain that existing drugs do little to relieve – amid evidence that psilocybin can help reduce both the condition’s physical and mental impact. Continue reading...

Prospect of medical therapies that rewind clock for humans edges a little closerThe prospect of medical therapies that rewind the clock on the ageing process has edged a little closer after scientists safely rejuvenated tissues in middle-aged mice.Researchers in the US treated healthy animals with a form of gene therapy that refreshed older cells, making the animals more youthful according to biological markers that are used to measure the effects of ageing. Continue reading...

My wife, Milica “Misha” Brozović, who has died aged 84, was a leading figure in the medical field of haematology. She was deeply committed to caring for patients and their families dealing with inherited blood diseases such as sickle cell disease. Her work resulted in better treatment, information and screening services nationally for these patients.Born in Belgrade, Serbia, Misha was the daughter of Jelisaveta (nee Vuković) and Filip Vasić, chief scientist at the city’s Institute for the Economics of Investments. While at grammar school she decided to become a physician. Continue reading...

The solutions to today’s food problemsEarlier today I set you the following puzzles about dividing up food, inspired by the Lwów school of mathematics, a group of mathematicians who lived in the city that is now Lviv in the 1930s.1) Three friends each contribute £4 to buy a £12 ham. The first friend divides it into three parts, asserting the weights are equal. The second friend, distrustful of the first, reweighs the pieces and judges them to be worth £3, £4 and £5. The third, distrustful of them both, weighs the ham on their own scales, getting another result. Continue reading...

Worst effect on region linked to smell, while infected people typically scored lower on mental skills testThe first major study to compare brain scans of people before and after they catch Covid has revealed shrinkage and tissue damage in regions linked to smell and mental capacities months after subjects tested positive.It comes as the largest study to date of the genetics of Covid-19 identified 16 new genetic variants associated with severe illness, and named a number of existing drugs that could be repurposed to prevent patients from getting severely ill, some of which are already in clinical trials. Continue reading...

Researchers say algorithm that translates acoustic signatures could be developed to automatically monitor animal wellbeingNever mind trouncing humans at video games and the ancient pursuits of chess and Go. Researchers have now harnessed the power of artificial intelligence to infer how pigs are feeling on the basis of their grunts.Scientists believe that the AI pig translator – which turns oinks, snuffles, grunts and squeals into emotions – could be used to automatically monitor animal wellbeing and pave the way for better livestock treatment on farms and elsewhere. Continue reading...

I’m a Covid researcher, but I’ve never tested positive. Studying variations in immune systems could lead to better vaccinesI’m one of the fortunate people who is yet to test positive for Covid. This is despite the fact that I work with live replicating Sars-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid) for my research, teach face-to-face at university, and have school-age children.My fully vaccinated healthy friends of the same age were not so lucky, and some have suffered from more than one case of Covid in the past couple of years. What does this reveal about my immune system?Dr Zania Stamataki is a senior lecturer and researcher in viral immunology at the University of Birmingham Continue reading...

When the city was a world centre of mathematical thoughtUPDATE: The solutions can be read hereLike many of you I’ve hardly been able to think about anything else these past ten days apart from the war in Ukraine. So today’s puzzles are a celebration of Lviv, Ukraine’s western city, which played an important role in the history of 20th century mathematics. During the 1930s, a remarkable group of scholars came up with new ideas, methods and theorems that helped shape the subject for decades.The Lwów school of mathematics – at that time, the city was in Poland – was a closely-knit circle of Polish mathematicians, including Stefan Banach, Stanisław Ulam and Hugo Steinhaus, who made important contributions to areas including set-theory, topology and analysis. Continue reading...

Having worked as an architect and photographer, run a bookshop and brought up four children, Bryony Harris has always sought new challenges. But becoming a therapist, she says, felt like coming homeAt 65, Bryony Harris withdrew her pension in a lump sum and enrolled on a psychotherapy course. “I like that I used my pension to train for a new career,” she says. Now, at 74, she has a thriving psychotherapy practice in Fredrikstad, Norway. “I just knew it was the right time, and I felt equipped to do it. It was the very best thing I ever did for myself.”The four-year course was on the coast of Denmark, where for a week a month Harris was “among sand dunes with this amazing empty wild beach right outside”. To get there, Harris drove for five hours through southern Norway. “It always felt like coming home,” she says. “I was a sponge, soaking up this stuff.”Tell us: has your life taken a new direction after the age of 60? Continue reading...

Prepare yourself for the challenge of seeing the planet with naked eyes in NovemberFor the second month in a row, we’re going to use the moon as a signpost as we limber up for the big November challenge of seeing planet Uranus with our naked eyes.The chart shows the view looking west-south-west from London at 1930 GMT on 7 March 2022. The moon will be a waxing crescent with just 26% of its visible surface illuminated. Continue reading...

Those with a positive attitude to life may lower their anxiety levels by avoiding argumentsPeople who have a rosy outlook on the world may live healthier, longer lives because they have fewer stressful events to cope with, new research suggests.Scientists found that while optimists reacted to, and recovered from, stressful situations in much the same way as pessimists, the optimists fared better emotionally because they had fewer stressful events in their daily lives. Continue reading...

Our ideas about males and females are wildly out of date, says zoologist Lucy Cooke. Here, she reveals some radical truths about the birds, the bees… and the bonobosLondon Zoo at half-term is a cheerful cacophony with blue macaws out-screaming six-year-olds, but in the relative calm of the lush spider “walkthrough” exhibit (apologies, arachnophobes), Lucy Cooke is happily absorbed. “Let’s see if we can see a big predatory female,” she says. We can: a gorgeously colourful golden orb weaver sits in the centre of her vast gold-tinted web, 125 times bigger than her tiny mate. “I didn’t realise that the majority of spiders are sexual cannibals, that the big spiders in the middle of webs were always female; males are basically wandering useless sacks of sperm,” Cooke says loudly in earshot of several harried-looking human fathers.This is a very Lucy Cooke observation: uncensored, pithily expressed and startlingly informative. There is plenty more of that in her new book, Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution & the Female Animal, a dazzling, funny and elegantly angry demolition of our preconceptions about female behaviour and sex in the animal kingdom (queendom?). Continue reading...

A devastating fire in my studio forced me to approach painting and life in a new wayTwo weeks before the first lockdown I was in my studio putting the finishing touches to my most ambitious body of paintings to date. The studio was packed with hundreds of works of art. For the past four years I had been working with the Syrian writer Professor Ali Souleman and the documentary filmmaker Mark Jones. Ali lost his sight in a bomb blast in Syria in 1997 and we had been attempting to translate his experiences of war and displacement into a collection of paintings – to make the unseen seen. Ali and Mark were coming the very next day for an unveiling. The studio was overstuffed, no pause or resting place for the eye anywhere. It was, in hindsight, a self-portrait of a restless mind.I’ve always been driven by obsessive-compulsive tendencies: counting and control, endless tinkering, seeking a never-coming calm. A patch of work caught my eye. Could it be a bit more darkened and burnt? I felt an itch behind my eyelid, a twitching fidget. I should have waited until I could move the boxes. I couldn’t wait. I switched on the blowtorch and passed it over the surface. It would only take a moment. A moment was all it took. Continue reading...

A new generation of detectors will be many times better at tracking discharges of the dangerous greenhouse gasLast month, scientists working with data from Tropomi, a monitoring instrument onboard the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5P satellite, published some startling findings. Writing in the journal Science, the team reported that it had found about 1,800 instances of huge releases of methane (more than 25 tonnes an hour) into the atmosphere in 2019 and 2020. Two-thirds of these were from oil and gas facilities, with the leaks concentrated over the largest oil and gas basins across the world, as well as major transmission pipelines, the team said.Launched in 2017, Tropomi has been a huge step forward for scientists researching methane, being the first instrument in space that can see plumes of methane emissions directly, says Lena Höglund-Isaksson, a methane researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis . For example, the instrument led to the discovery of huge methane leaks in Turkmenistan that researchers were not aware of before, she says. Continue reading...

The US psychology professor talks about her new book on the experience of losing a loved one and the lessons we can learnMary-Frances O’Connor is an associate professor at the University of Arizona, where she leads the grief, loss and social stress (Glass) lab, investigating the effects of grief on the brain and the body.Why do humans grieve? One of the earliest things that we learn is that we’re all going to die, so when it happens, why is it such a shock?

Zolgensma is a revolutionary gene therapy that can stop a deadly childhood condition called SMA in its tracks. It’s also one of the most expensive drugs in the worldElizabeth Wraige remembers the first time she delivered the diagnosis. “Parents feel as if they’ve been hit by a sledgehammer,” she says. Her patient, a baby boy, had been born tiny and perfect to overjoyed parents six months earlier. But they had begun to feel something was not right. He seemed floppy and was not moving normally. Tests showed he had spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), the most deadly genetic condition in children under two, in which a deficit of a crucial protein causes motor neurons to die, and the body slowly loses the ability to move. Babies with untreated type 1 SMA, the most severe form, will never sit, crawl or speak and are slowly robbed of the ability to move, swallow and breathe. Most die before they are two.“In that conversation, any hope that it was something that could be remedied was taken away,” says Wraige, a paediatric neurologist at Evelina London children’s hospital. “It was devastation.” She could offer only one shred of consolation: SMA, an incurable condition that affects one in 6,000-10,000 children, is at least not painful.Arnaud Robert and Paolo Woods write: Zach, who lives in the suburbs of Chicago, was born with SMA, and given Zolgensma in October 2019, when he was eight months old. His father’s trucking union funded the millions needed. Zach also takes a daily medication. Continue reading...

Our features have been obscured by masks, or viewed on screens, for months. We may never look at ourselves in the same way again, writes novelist Ruth OzekiLast April, I ran into a neighbour on the street. This was not a person I knew well, just someone I used to see from my window, walking masked around the neighbourhood during that first locked-down winter of the pandemic. But by spring 2021, the dangers seemed to be subsiding. People in our Massachusetts town were vaccinated and venturing outside unmasked, happy to stop and chat with anyone. It was a beautiful morning; the sunlight remaking the world so that everything looked a bit too bright and clear, as if racked into sudden and unsettling focus. And there was something unsettling about my neighbour, too. We were laughing and swapping lockdown stories, enjoying the in-person, face-to-face communion, when suddenly it struck me that it had been over a year since I’d seen a mouth belonging to someone other than my husband operating at close range.As mouths go, this one was quite ordinary, and a year earlier, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But masking had defamiliarised mouths, turning them into something strange. This mouth was so brazenly red, its lips rubbery and wet. Inside it, I could see teeth, gums, even a tongue, and all these parts were moving. The mouth did not look like it should belong to the man’s face; it was a body part, an orifice too intimate to be on display. I couldn’t stop staring. Continue reading...

Psychologists advise having age-appropriate conversations about nuclear weapons and staying optimistic

Study of UK adults shows negative effects of alcohol consumption grow stronger with each additional drinkCutting back on the final drink of the evening could substantially improve brain health, scientists have said.A major study of more than 36,000 adults suggests that the negative effects of alcohol consumption grow stronger with each additional drink. So those who drink several units each day potentially have the most to gain by reducing their drinking. Continue reading...

Most academics back research boycott but ‘there is a case for maintaining ties’, says Oxford professor

Researchers tap into self-regulatory methods such as setting goals and keeping a diarySetting daily meat reduction goals and keeping an online diary of intake helped frequent meat eaters to halve their consumption in just over nine weeks, a trial has found.The trial, by researchers at the University of Oxford’s Livestock, Environment and People (Leap) programme, also found the routine was popular with participants, who felt it supported them to change their diet. Continue reading...

Seven-step process to enable segments to work as a single mirror nears halfway pointNasa has completed three of the seven stages to bring the 18 hexagonal segments of the James Webb space telescope’s primary mirror into alignment.On 25 February, Nasa announced that the mirror segments were in place and their individual images stacking together. This means the separate images produced by the segments have been united to form a single image. Continue reading...

Description of ingredient as ‘ocean fish’ means owners are unwittingly giving their pets vulnerable species for dinnerPet food containing endangered sharks is being fed to cats and dogs by unwitting owners, a study has revealed.Scientists found that several brands contained endangered species but listed only vague ingredients such as “ocean fish”, meaning that consumers are often oblivious. Continue reading...